I was absent from my posting duties last week, and it makes me feel incredibly guilty.  I guess that’s why I am writing this short musing piece.  A nice way to alleviate any guilt I hold, I suppose.

We are reading Anthem by Ayn Rand for my English class, so I am glad to say I will have something to write about when I finish.  This is my first foray into Ayn Rand’s works, and I am enjoying it completely.  I am trying to follow the assignment schedule, and read the chapters as they are assigned.  I am not sure I will be able to stick with that.

I plan on taking part of the Japanese Film Blogathon over at Wild Grounds.  I am contemplating which movie(s) to watch, and I am pretty sure Kikujiro will be the first.  I will post a link somewhere, when I get started so you can see what I think of it.

NaNoWriMo: This is the official site to sign up and participate in NaNoWriMo. Jump in!

Scrivener: A seriously kick-ass program for writers, and generally considered the best out there. I personally just started using it and I’m falling in love with the chapter note insert options, as I tend to have a lot of rambling thoughts I like to jot down that don’t immediately fit as I write. It really helps scrambled-brained as well as the well organized (I fall somewhere in-between). Scrivener has a free 30-day trial for Macs and is about $45 for the paid version. Personally, I think it’s worth it. There is a Windows version now available, but it’s still in beta testing, and expires at the end of the year.

PageFour: Pretty similar to Scrivener, as it helps making organizing your story elements waaay easier. If you’re using Windows, this is your lover. Embrace him/her now.

And please, try to remember that the point is not to write a perfect story. It is more to just to put aside excuses and write something. No writing is ever wasted; I always compare it to a good workout at the the gym. Don’t spend too much time debating whether or not you’re going to do it, because the month is ticking away! We can always improve as writers, and there’s no time like the present, right?

Stay tuned, as I will be posting PS new feature column this week… as soon as I stop fussing over it.

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. – Discover more animation and arts videos.

My argument, perhaps too idealistic and full of youthful zeal but that’s the way I roll, was that young directors in Korea need to band together and just make films instead of sitting around writing scenario after scenario and never getting them picked up by a production company. Korea is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. The internet is easily accessible by most of the country via cell phones, PC rooms, or even on the street at kiosks. Seoul itself is a wireless enabled city and this is a culture that created the netizen. The DVD industry is all but dead in Korea and there is a severe lack of art house cinemas. The multiplexes usually do not pick up smaller independent films or documentaries as they do not preform well going against the latest romantic drama with whatever young actors are trending at the moment, and the Hollywood blockbusters make them too much money.

So what should they do? I’m shocked that more people do not release them online. Here is a country that makes our high speed internet look like dial-up, with a population that is constantly hooked up to the internet and there is nothing like the Netflix rental service or even Hulu. I argued that all it would take would be for one or two things to make it big, or sort of a filmmaking revolution that used social networking and new media distribution techniques to change this. I feel that if young filmmakers gather together and use existing technology such as Vimeo, Youtube, and even the Chinese Youku (as the Korean wave was a smash in China) they could start that same revolution. Think about it a couple years ago webseries and webisode were not in our lexicon. Now they make up a large portion of our viewing. How long has it been since you have watched TV on TV? I use Hulu for most of my shows and Netflix for the rest. Documentary director Kim Dong-won (sort of a personal hero to me) started Purn Productions which is a documentary collective that has produced some of the most interesting documentary work I’ve seen and arguably the modern equivalent of minjung art (which is a whole other article for another time). 

There is light at the end of the tunnel however, The Romantic Movement Seoul is a new project staring Min Hyo-rin and adapted from the first several chapters of Romantic Movement, a novel by popular Swiss writer Alain de Botton. Now this sounds like just another Korean drama, especially with directors such as Kang Chul-woo and Park Hyun-jin at the helm. Each director gets a segment (there will be four in all) and it is shot on location around Seoul with the Canon 5d (a DSLR camera that shoots 1080p HD video). The major difference is that this is being released online. The first episode was released on the 30th and the site has integrated twitter in an interesting way on their fan wall, and if I’m not mistaken uses WordPress as a CMS (much like us). In between each episode there are also several webisodes featuring the series number one fan (a crazy American who is rather entertaining) as well as behind the scenes footage. Min Hyo-rin is not the only rather big star in this either, Yeo Wook-hwan, Defconn (a Korean hip-hop performer), and Mate’s Jung Jun-il will all have roles in the short film. I have watched the first episode and it is decently acted and shot well, although it is very melodramatic and so far doesn’t differentiate itself stylistically from any other k-dramas you might see on television.

I do not think this is a bad thing at all. In fact it was a smart choice on the part of the project leaders as it will allow Korean audiences a familiar transition to a newer format, and appeal to a much wider audience than say a Korean equivalent to The Guild. Choosing the very popular author Alain de Botton was another genius stroke. The broader appeal that this project receives the more likely similar projects will be made. The other thing that I appreciate is the English subtitles embedded in the video. They are appealing to a wide audience, and I am interested in what is coming next and wish them the best of luck. Hopefully it will catch on and people will try to expand stylistically and explore the digital format.

You can follow Romantic Movement on twitter. And here is the Part 1 of the first episode:

Well, they’ve outdone themselves again this year, announcing a new equipment rank system for WoW players and two mobile games that are sure to be hits.

Epic Storytelling

Two New Mobile games

As a writer, I am super excited for the announcement of the game Queen’s Quest for mobile platforms from Blizzard. The fact I can move through this story of “betrayal, love, action, drama, comedy, life, death, destiny, freedom, war, peace, hope, despair, and epic adventure” using just my words is groundbreaking for the industry! And do I even need to say it? Look at those graphics, and that dialogue. I think I’ll have to stop playing WoW for this one. I’ll be picking up these 17 floppy disks from the store as soon as it’s released, you can be sure of that.

(and my personal favorite announcement..)

My EPEEN is bigger than yours! You can't talk to me!

Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number (or, E.P.E.E.N.)

With the recent emphasis in game about gear score (for those of you that don’t play WoW, each item has an “item level” that indicates what tier of content an item is from. Gear score is all of these item levels added together, which is supposed to be an indication of a player’s level of gear.. and, obviously, skill), the good folks at Blizzard have taken it upon themselves to further streamline this process of weeding out poor players from the best. They’ll be releasing the E.P.E.E.N. system with Cataclysm, the next expansion, which will phase characters out based on their E.P.E.E.N. ranking, meaning only the best will be able to speak to someone with a very high E.P.E.E.N. score. I think Blizz said it best:

As your number grows, the game world will tailor itself to you in other subtle ways: as the pool of players you interact with becomes more and more exclusive, you’ll no longer need to stand still in prominent locations quite so often to allow others to inspect your gear; you’ll have fewer time-wasting calendar invitations to sift through; and your friends list will become increasingly more manageable, reducing needless scrolling time. Any negative repercussions of these changes will be offset by the satisfaction you’ll receive knowing your equipment is significantly more impressive than average.

As always, Blizz, I commend you on your industry-changing April First news releases.

Go over there and show your support (and join in the April Fools fun~!)

We are a generation who watched WarGames and thought wow that is a crazy computer, now our cell phones are more powerful than WOPR. Obviously I’m a technological optimist, and every once in a while I stumble on infodump videos that make me marvel at the world around us. Today I want to share this one with you. Its from the Socialnomics crew.

Also this one from the awesome guys from XPLANE:

You’re Welcome.